I have a 6pm meeting at the Amsterdam Rhino tonight, to discuss this spring’s Rwandan fundraiser. Guaranteed we are not going to all sit around a table and have drinks and no pub food, so I’m leaving Mike and Willem to their own devices. We had a late lunch anyway, when they came home from the zoo tired and starving.

For lunch, I had two Spolumbo’s sausages left in the fridge, both spicy Italian, and so turned one into pasta sauce. One of my favorite things to do with these sausages is to squeeze them at about 1 inch intervals from their casings into a hot olive-oiled skillet, producing instant meatballs. There is no shaping, no mixing. They hold together perfectly. If you want to saute up some onion and red pepper first, that’s up to you. Once they are browned, pour in some tomato sauce and let it simmer – this will not only complete the cooking, but will season the sauce deliciously. In this way, one sausage feeds the three of us. If you don’t want pasta, this is a great way to make meatball subs.

I cooked up some whole wheat rotini – chunky pastas are well suited to this sauce – and then because we were out of Parmesan cheese (and I’m sorry, but I do require some cheese on my Italian sausage and tomato pastas) I divvied it up into three small oven-safe bowls and sprinkled some grated part-skim mozzarella over each, baked them in the oven for about 10 minutes to melt it, and voila, dinner. (Or was it lunch?)